On 2007-12-04 09:03:02 +0000, 405 TD Estate said:

When I replace my old boiler and heating controls I am wondering
whether to fit motorised valves and controls so for example you could
have the heating on in my bedroom only or just down stairs etc -
obviously this is just done with a view to save cash on gas not
heating areas of the house not in use.

The problem is say I did each room with a valve they are about £50 or
£100 each I think so that's £3-600 before the more expensive control
box (do they even do control boxes that can control 6 valves?) then
the pain of the wiring and the chance of valves failing....

Is this worh it or should I just keep it simple and heat the whole
house in 1 go?

Or perhaps a compromise and not heat the combined lounge/dining room
on a morning?

It rather depends on the house layout and whether you are happy to have
all the doors closed for most of the time. If you are going to leave
them open - especially the downstairs ones, then it becomes academic.

There are packaged systems such as Honeywell Hometronic which will
cover the entire requirement.


http://europe.hbc.honeywell.com/hometronic/home.htm


Otherwise you can do an S-plan plus system. The principle of this
is that you organise the pipework to create heating zones and then put
a zone valve on each. Each zone has a thermostat (timer/thermostat
if you want) which controls opening of the valve and then the
auxilliary switch on the valve is used to fire up the boiler.

Effectively, though, this means having all zones in "parallel" and not
in series for it to work properly - i.e. you can't effectively put a
zone arrangement downstream of another covering other parts of the
house - each has to have its own supply. However, this does not mean
that you *have* to rejig all the pipework to home run the zones back to
the boiler. You can put valves belonging to a single zone in
parallel. For example, let's say you have a large room with a radiator
at either end but with the feeds arriving from different places. You
could put a zone valve nxt to each and operate both with one thermostat
choosing one to provide the boiler switching.

Another approach is to use Sauter electrically operated radiator
valves. These fit in place instead of the normal thermostatic ones
and can be opened and closed by applying 24v to them. This avoids the
plumbing issue but there is still a lot of wiring to do.